Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Acts appointed for today, Paul has an encounter with a sorcerer, Elymas, to whom he says, “Will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?” It’s easy from our (supposedly) more enlightened contemporary vantage to write off things like magic as so much superstition and hokum, to write off Elymas as a charlatan or a silly archaic so and so. But we oughtn’t. Paul, for one, takes him seriously, and we might want to as well—not because his magic is or isn't legitimate (whatever that might mean), but because in Elymas we might discover more of a kindred spirit than we might like to admit. In fact, there’s something in Paul’s words to Elymas that I think we, too, need to hear.

Now, I don’t want to go too far into what sorcery is or might be, but one of the things that, from ancient times, has attracted the human imagination to occult practices of questionable virtue has been the tempting idea that if you could just find and exploit the right connections in the cosmos, if you could cozy up to the right spirit or preternatural power through the right sorts of gifts or coercion or worship, if you could pronounce a special word or a special name in a special way at a special time on a special day in a special place, if you could do all that, then maybe, just maybe…you could be in control. In control of what? Well, sky’s the limit, and often quite literally so according to magical legends and literature. Most fundamentally, though, you could be in control of your own life.

But how often do we fall prey to the same sorts of temptation, the same sorts of desire for control? How often do we give ourselves to various forms of magical thinking, believing that if we say the right things at the right times, if we do the right things, if we jump through the right hoops, if we worship the right way, say the right prayer, that things will work out for us, that God will show us favor? How often do we forget that one of the most wonderful (and, let’s be honest, difficult!) things we believe about God is that God’s favor cannot in fact be earned by any doing of our own, but is freely given to us in love through Jesus Christ? How often do we imagine that we do something nice for God or something worthy of reward by God when we worship God, forgetting that worship is a God-given opportunity for us to speak through scripture God’s own words; to live and re-live God’s own self-revelation; to practice the divinely ordained rites traditioned by the apostles to the church; and thereby to come alongside what God has already done and is already doing in our midst, to be given by grace to that doing whereby God gently forms us more perfectly into the Divine Likeness of Jesus Christ? How often do we “make crooked the straight paths of God,” complicating grace, making it a reward or a prize to be earned rather than the simple, free and loving gift that it is and always has been? How often do we, Faust-like, prefer to grasp at power, at a sense of being-in-control when our fulfillment truly lies in being held in and upheld by the wounded hands of the Lover of Souls?

Elymas is eventually struck temporarily blind for obstructing Paul’s witness, and his blindness is, in fact, a kind of mercy. Like Paul himself, blinded by his vision of Christ, Elymas will need now to learn how to lean on others, with the hope (which many ancient church fathers believed was realized) that he may learn to lean on the grace of the One. May we, too, learn to walk in love and grace, not self-seeking power and control, by holding the hand that holds us!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+